This Special Issue on Morphological Processing is based on the sixth MOrphological PROcessing Conference (MOPROC), which was kept in June 2009 in Turku, Finland. The issue contains 13 articles by leading scholars in the field of morphological processing. These articles investigate the role morphemes play in language comprehension, production and…

This eye-tracking study explores visual recognition of Dutch suffixed words (e.g., "plaats+ing" "placing") embedded in sentential contexts, and provides new evidence on the interplay between storage and computation in morphological processing. We show that suffix length crucially moderates the use of morphological properties. In words with shorter…

This article reports an eye-tracking experiment with 2,500 polymorphemic Dutch compounds presented in isolation for visual lexical decision while readers' eye movements were registered. The authors found evidence that both full forms of compounds ("dishwasher") and their constituent morphemes (e.g., "dish," "washer," "er") and morphological…

Previous studies have suggested that previews of words prior to fixation can be processed orthographically, but not semantically, during reading of sentences (K. Rayner, D. A. Balota, & A. Pollatsek, 1986). The present study tested whether semantic processing of previews can occur within words. The preview of the second constituent of…

This paper explores the time-course of morphological processing of trimorphemic Finnish compounds. We find evidence for the parallel access to full-forms and morphological constituents diagnosed by the early effects of compound frequency, as well as early effects of left constituent frequency and family size. We also observe an interaction between…

Finnish has a very productive morphology in which a stem can give rise to several thousand words. This study presents a visual lexical decision experiment addressing the processing consequences of the huge productivity of Finnish morphology. The authors observed that in Finnish words with larger morphological families elicited shorter response…

This eye movement study investigated the use of two types of segmentation cues in processing long Finnish compounds. The cues were related to the vowel quality properties of the constituents and properties of the consonant starting the second constituent. In Finnish, front vowels never appear with back vowels in a lexeme, but different quality…

Focuses on the role of context on the processing of inflected nouns in Finnish. Identification of partitive plurals with the homonymic suffix -jA was studied by presenting the target nouns in a sentence context and by recording durations of readers' eye fixations and self-paced reading times for these targets. Results are discussed. (Author/VWL)